mercredi 16 avril 2008

In an article in New Left Review, that graveyard of all hope, Baudrillard writes, "Fifteen hundred cars had to burn in a single night and then, on a descending scale, nine hundred, five hundred, two hundred, for the daily ‘norm’ to be reached again, and people to realize that ninety cars on average are torched every night in this gentle France of ours." ('The Pyres of Autumn', (Feb. 2006))

It is remarkable that the, now extinct, French intellectuals known supposedly for being 'radicals' and revolutionary deconstructionists of all that was once sacred, were in fact nothing of the sort. Derrida was little more than a social democrat, Foucault for all his bluster was deep down a conformist and even Sartre, the hallowed figure of contemporary French thought, was no more, really, than a clever, but spoiled, bourgeois individualist - and a Cartesian one at that. As for Baudrillard, what is disappointing about this article is that in it he didn't call for not only the burning of all the cars in France but all the wretched things in the world together with the factories that spew them out in ever increasing numbers and at an ever increasing rate.